Lang in Use - Vocabulary - Time-Travel
Lang in Use - Vocabulary - Time-Travel
Lang in Use - Vocabulary - Time-Travel
Complete the text about time travelling. Fill in the blanks from the word list on the
right. There are TWO words you will not need.
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KEY
Time travel - moving between different points in time – has been a popular topic for science
fiction for decades. Films ranging from Doctor Who to Star Trek have seen humans getting into
a vehicle of some sort and arriving in the past or future, ready to take on new adventures. The
reality, however, is much unclearer. While some scientists claim that time travel is possible
others say, even if it were, it would be fatal for humans to try it.
For Albert Einstein, the 20th century’s greatest physicist, time is relative. It does not pass
equally for everyone. His theory of special relativity says that time slows down or speeds up
depending on how fast you move compared with something else. Approaching the speed of
light, a person inside a spacecraft would be much younger than his twin on Earth. In the same
way, astronauts who are sent into space age slightly slower than they would on earth.
According to the American space agency NASA, there are scenarios that would make travelling
back and forth in time imaginable. One possibility would be through wormholes, bridges
between certain points in space and time. While theoretically possible, we do not even know if
wormholes exist. In addition, we are far from creating a technology that would let us move
through them.
Besides the physics problem, time travel may also come with some unique situations. A classic
example is the grandfather effect, in which a time traveller goes back and kills his parents or
his grandfather – the main storyline in the Terminator movies – so that they are never born,
or their life is forever changed. If that were to happen, some physicists say you would not be
born in one parallel universe but still be born in another.
Many scientists disagree with all the above-mentioned options. They claim that time travel will
never work because it is mathematically impossible. In addition, nobody could survive
traveling at the speed of light. Despite these bleak predictions, we can still experience time
travel through movies, television and books
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